


Turn Your Sails To Home

by archea2



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Crossover, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, First Time, Fix-It, Healing, Humor, Open Marriage, Pirates, Post-At World's End, Post-Book: The Last Battle (Narnia), Romance, The Problem of Susan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:34:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27305656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: Susan takes a leap of faith.
Relationships: Elizabeth/Will (mentioned), Susan Pevensie/Elizabeth Swann
Comments: 12
Kudos: 38
Collections: Shipoween 2020 - The Halloween Ship Exchange!





	Turn Your Sails To Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ForsythiaRising](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForsythiaRising/gifts).



> Dear ForsythiaRising,
> 
> Thank you for a lovely prompt and a new crossover OTP! This treat turned into a trip and a half, but I hope it'll give you at least some of the pleasure I had writing it. 
> 
> Note: the fic takes place post both canons - _At World's Ends_ for Elizabeth and _The Last Battle_ for Susan. I haven't warned for characters' deaths as none occurs during the fic, and, as we know, the characters who died canonically before... are not exactly dead.

Two yellow rings and two green. Each pair carefully wrapped in a clean sock of Peter’s, each sock rolled up and shoved down into a pocket of his new blazer, Mother's gift on the occasion of his coming-of-age birthday party. There had been a cake (Lu), a latecomer (Ed, hobbling back from rugby) and a wish (Peter, his eyes on Susan. She had looked away). 

This was Sunday. On Monday the week after, the socks were delivered to her amid a ragtag of family these and those. Lucy’s handkerchief. Mother’s hat (it was Father’s joke that Mother should request to be buried in her hat, the way _her_ Victorian foremothers had been in their wedding-rings). Father’s case and paperwork, some of which Susan had typed to derail him out of the dreary Youth Employment Talk and into a smile. Peter’s socks. 

_An extra pair of socks_ , the inventory said almost dourly. Susan shook them out of the manilla envelop and picked them up, one in each hand, tightening her palms around them as if the socks were waifs, orphaned too, and Susan’s ungloved hands the only foster home she could offer. This was how she felt the rings - felt them imprint their smooth circlets into her flesh, past the layer of wool.

She knew what they were; knew why Peter had, at the peak of June, chosen his thickest winter socks to wrap them in. Susan praised herself on her short-term memory. It had been enough to see her through school tests here and one-night flirts in Washington, and it was enough now to raise Peter’s voice, with the crack that talking to Susan always put in it, leaving it younger than befitted a come-of-age voice and yet somehow Father’s peer, which Susan had loved and resented in equal parts.

_We’re leaving, Su. Are you sure you won’t come? You could be the lookout while we dig up the rings._

_Oh, well. Scavenger hunts - bit past_ my _prime, you know._

_Join us at the station, then. The Professor and Aunt Polly would be so happy to -_

_You go and have your Narnia lark, Pete. Say hello to the old dears for me._

_Are you sure you won’t come?_

Her thoughts fought the loop; drifted back to her London bedsitter. Nancy would be home from work by now, feeding the meter a shilling because even in June 1949 London was a cold beast of a place. She thought of wet pavements and the ever-after smog, only pierced by the reds of buses and telephone booths echoing her own red-stitched eyes. Then she glanced down at her hands.

The rings must have been shiny once. Now they were drab, a girl’s keepsake gone lackluster while the girl grew and shone on her own. But you still could see that two were yellow and two were green. Better green than red, she thought. Better the fancy, better this millisecond’s giving in to their silly make-belief than the reality of returning to Nancy (who had sounded rather evasive on the phone) and hearing that shilling drop for the next forty years, its fall creating circles that would not ripple and widen like raindrops in a pond, but contract around Susan’s heart, tighter with every drop, an iron ring.

_The yellow ring takes you to a wood with ever so many pools in it. The green one takes you to Narnia, but you have to step into the nearest pool first. We can’t go back, you and I, but Eustace and Jill might still have a crack at it. Just - come with us, Su. Come and see for yourself._

_Come and see_

_Come_

Outside, the rain had begun. It felt to Susan as if it would never stop, only gather and gather until its thickness punched a hole in the atmosphere through which the last shred of Pete, Ed, Lu, would be sucked away. Would she laugh them off, one day? Would she tell a girl friend over cocktails, I had these imaginary brothers I made up as a child, oh, and a sister too, fancy that?

Neatly, Mother’s practical girl to the last, she rolled up the sock with the green rings in it and slipped it into her coat pocket. She planted her feet one behind the other until she’d found her poise. 

She shut both eyes for better sighting. 

And she touched the yellow ring.

* * *

When her face broke the surface of water, it was enveloped all at once by air and brine and brilliant light. She had waded into sweetwater; but at some point it had morphed into a deeper, cloudier blue while it took Susan in its grip, and now it _was_ the sea mobbing her nostrils; enveloping her from the neck down and making it necessary to flex and kick her legs behind her until she could re-enter it horizontally. Susan, who had changed out of a black pleated skirt into slacks and saddle shoes, twisted her arms out of the soaked coat and rolled onto her hip. The sea-change had been a shock, but inside the shock was hope, gloved in her memory - now stretching out, like her arm before her - of Lucy’s voice.

For there was a ship almost at arm’s length, sailing toward her.

_There was a ship, Su, a Narnian ship, and Caspian at its prow throwing us a line, and it felt as if the line was anchored not to the mast but past it and through the sky, well and truly anchored to  
_

The ship’s prow was a swan’s head - and the figure at the prow, crying “Cast a line!” was fair-haired with a girl’s laughing voice. For one rapt moment Susan thought she might be Lucy, come to find her aboard the _Splendour Hyaline_. But as she cut firm strokes towards the rope, she saw that this was a smaller ship: the swan’s head was at best rough-carved, and the swan’s wings did not spread on each side of the wooden hull. And the girl (Susan saw while she was being hauled up onto the deck, dripping) was not Lucy. She was taller, her hair darker-blond and her nose nothing like Lucy’s sweet turned-up nose.

The disappointment fell on Susan like a yoke. She stared at the girl and the girl stared back, neither of them finding a word to say. Not so the man at the wheel, shaking a white-haired head and looking the picture of glunch. _He_ had one word to say, and say it he did - glunchly.

“Wench.”

“No, Mr. Gibbs.” The girl’s voice was quiet, but it was a voice that brokered no _still,_ let alone _but_. “Lady. I should know - if you recall, I used to be one.”

She turned to look at Susan, who was instantly made aware of two things: the girl’s comely face, polished by her tan, and the fact that while they both wore white blouses, the girl's was loose, barely tucked into her flaring slacks, whereas Susan’s clung to her from neck- to waistline, courtesy of the saltwater.

Gathering her wits against a scalding rush of blood, she raised her head, chin forward, saying “I thank you for rescuing me. My name is Susan P…” (But no: when she had touched the ring, she had done so from the defiant impulse to be made another late Pevensie.) “I am Susan of Narnia.”

A merry shadow seemed to pass over her interlocutor’s face. “Elizabeth of Port Royal,” she said. “Your Ladyship is most welcome.” 

Behind them the crew had started a running commentary. Susan thought she caught “Narn-isle?” and “That be patois”, while Mr. Gibbs, his spirits momentarily raised by the introduction, slid back into despondency. “Mother’s love,” he muttered. “A lady what has no petticoats and barely a ring on ’er. Speak of bad luck.”

“The lady is not for ransoming,” Elizabeth said firmly. “The lady is for drying. She is my guest, and will be shown the respect that makes you all gentlemen of fortune.” Her mouth trembled into a tease. “Savvy?”

But Susan did not share in the laugh. For she had just realized a terrible thing: that the green ring was still on her finger, but the yellow ones, which had made the trip in her pocket, were now sunk to the sea-floor along with her discarded coat. She saw the whole picture, and it was not pleasant. The Professor had been untypically vague with his “nearest pond” - there had been five of them, making it a here-goes-nothing venture to pick one. And now there was no way to go back and try her luck again. 

Lucidity grew dark, as Susan wondered if this was Aslan’s doing - the Lion tossing her between his paws as he’d done long ago in play, only to flip the play into punishment. Susan _had_ deserted Narnia, after all; perhaps her leap of faith had been too little and too late, and her just deserts were to be stranded in turn, alone, all all alone, forever divided from Ed and Lu and Peter and Mother and Father.

She broke into tears, into a trail of choked “Oh”, even as she fought the indignity of crying before strange men. Brine and tearsalt disputing her eyes, until she felt Elizabeth’s arm line her shoulders with warmth as she led Susan across the deck, the crew parting before them, and down some steps into a small cabin. Blurrily, Susan saw a basin and a ewer, and a keg of freshwater, while Elizabeth opened a chest packed with linen.

“There,” she said. “If you were an old salt, I’d offer a chew of bacy, but these will be of better comfort. Sometimes a fresh shirt can be a fresh start, Susan of Narnia.”

“It’s plain Susan,” said Susan, the tears still close-at-eye.

“Now that’s a lie if I ever heard one. Here” - and as Elizabeth delivered the pile of sailor garb, her hand brushed Susan’s ringed finger. A mere wisp of sensation, but to Susan something more tangible, like a gift from Elizabeth’s heart to Susan’s hand, charged with an almost electrifying sympathy. But surely…

“Have yourself a change, then. Have no fear and a change, and we’ll talk after grub.”

* * *

Grub was biscuit, very dry and nowhere near shortbread or jaffa, Susan’s favorites, let alone Mrs. Beaver’s marmalade roll. But it came with an apple and plenty of sweetwater. She ate rather stiffly, waiting for the (literally motley) crew to start critiquing rations. But the men were, if anything, more self-conscious than she was. Only Elizabeth tucked in heartily, perched on a coil of rope.

Now for the interrogation, thought Susan. But the other woman glanced at her above the line of kohl pencilled on her lower lids, and appeared to reflect. Then she said, quite startlingly, “I wonder if you could help me?”

Susan looked around while the crew looked at Susan. It was hard to tell which party was more panicked.

“Not with the ropes,” Elizabeth amended, laughing. “You’d have to learn them first. No, it’s Henry. My son. His playtime was right when we rescued you, so he’s made it very clear you are _his_ share of the loot. Could you find it in you to look after a gentleboy of four and fortune?”

“Oh,” said Susan. “I - that is - yes, of course. Yes. I’ll be glad to help.”

And she was. From this moment on, her mood was uncommonly lifted. She still had no idea where she was and if she was there by election, by prescription or by Mr Gibbs’s personal streak of bad luck, but she _was_ starting to feel better. It helped that Henry, when he emerged tuft-haired from his nap, proved (a) a scamp, (b) a darling, and (c) transparently smitten with her. He dragged Susan all over the ship in what became part owner’s tour and part hide-and-seek, wholly reminiscent of the happy romps she'd had with little Corin, another blond playfellow. 

Perhaps, she told herself, the child’s head loling on her chest as they watched the sun sink into the sea “like a piece of eight” (Henry), this wasn't punishment. Perhaps an interlude. She had divorced herself so long from Narnia that Narnia, even now, felt more like a thing of the past than another green horizon. Susan longed to see her beloved again, but did not know if she could still be Queen Susan in their eyes, who had made Cair Paravel a place of life and beauty against their various homecomings. Could she? Now that she was the one coming home? America had changed her - had been to her, Susan now saw, an ersatz Narnia. Which wasn’t bad in and of itself, no more than, say, plastic, once America’s substitute for horn and ivory. (She closed her eyes briefly.) 

And the Susan who had embraced nylon and lipstick for the shine they lent her, once stripped of Narnia’s gems and glittering clothes, had not sinned. But she had forgotten that the jewels, the glitter, even Narnia’s rich prairies and everywhere woods, had only been pointers to something even brighter, more and elusively wonderful. When had she let go of the wonder?

And was it why she was there? Because the wonder was here too, made visible with a difference?

She glanced up from the child in her lap, and there was Elizabeth: tall and slender, standing on the deck taffrail with the sun behind her shoulder blades and her hair fountaining with light. She was humming.

The hum welled into a song, taken up by the crew.

_Turn your sails to home_

_And towards home turn your sails,_

_Thief and beggar, hoist your colour high_

_And never say we die._

* * *

  
  
It was night when they talked at last. 

Susan stood at the prow, watching the swan’s beak point the ship forward to where the moon basked in the sea, only broken by a quartet of porpoises come out to play. They chased each other around the prow and Susan looked on them, her mind on a barefoot Ed racing Peter along Narnia’s light-coloured shore. One last romp before the ruins, and the doubts - before her long good-bye to enchantment. 

“Now will you tell me?”

She stirred, letting Elizabeth place a hand, still warm from the day, on her arm.

“I will. I owe you that much - but will you believe me?”

“I've seen much in my young day,” said Elizabeth, smiling. “Try me.”

Susan opened her mouth, first letting the soft-salty air into her lungs. “I, I am looking for my family. They’re all dead - up to a point. Oh dear, I’m telling this so wrong.”

“Not at all,” said Elizabeth softly. “Dead, only not. I feel your point.” She bit her lip, then… “Did they die at sea?”

Susan shook her head and Elizabeth turned hers away, obscuring her face for a minute. Then she motioned Susan to go on.

“I think there’s a place where they might be, that I’ve known before, and if they are… then, they’ll be alive and well.” And now that Susan had her theme, she found that she couldn’t stop, not until she’d told Elizabeth everything about the rings, and Narnia, the marvel and the loss of it, made limitless by that of her best beloved. 

“And I guess I was meant to stay alone, wait it out, I know that, but it was too hard. I couldn’t just _be_ there and do nothing, I had to _move_ , because…”

“Because if we stay put,” Elizabeth whispered, “where we’re told to, steering the dull course assigned to us, day in day out, we’ll go mad.”

“Because we miss them.”

“Because we never knew how much we’d miss them, until they were taken from us.”

“Oh, you get it, you do! Oh, Elizabeth! Thank you!” 

And, giddy with gratitude, Susan did something she had never done before. She leant forward and kissed Elizabeth on the mouth. Because it was a happy, hopeful mouth, but also because it was kindhearted; and, lastly, because it had kept still through the tangled line of Susan’s tale. It was a delicious kiss, that did not feel like a sin in the night, perhaps because Elizabeth was returning it.

“I think I have an idea,” she told Susan, the words fleshed out by the immediacy between her lips. “But I need to think on it, and for you to sleep. Go now, sweetness.”

Susan did. Later, in the cabin’s unsteady penumbra, she tossed and turned with the waves; half of her still out on that deck, kissing Elizabeth; while the other was Practical Susan, parsing the why. Susan had been at school, where it was customary to have "pashes" - Nancy, a brazen stunner, had been one - and pay one another chaste, burning midnight calls over hot cocoa. But Susan had not been a cocoa flirt. She had lacquered her lips so impeccably that no one, girl or beau, had dared to touch them, their red glaze a warning and a memory that Susan had once been the proverbial moth singed in the fire ( _Rabadash_ ). The memory had sunk deep, heart-deep inside her conscious mind, but not so deep that Susan hadn’t faced her fear of fire by turning herself into the flame. 

Not the wisest move, but she’d made it work well enough...

…until Elizabeth’s naked mouth met hers, opening just enough for a taste of sweetwater. 

Susan let her eyelids slip quiet and thought back to Dryads, and Naiads, and the Great River streaming bountifully through the woods, and what it had been, once, to be without fear.

* * *

When she climbed onto the deck again, she felt unable to look Elizabeth in the eye. But Elizabeth, eating an apple, simply said “Good morrow” and gave her a lightmouthed kiss in full view of the crew. Who hustled and bustled on with nary a blink.

“So,” she said while an enthusiastic Henry boarded Susan’s lap. “Narnia. You said it opened onto the sea.”

“On the Eastern coast, yes. But since it’s another world, this must be another sea?”

One of the men passing by paused to give Susan a reproving look. “Sea is sea,” he said in a tone that suffered no reply. “No two ways 'bout that.”

“I met the Sea once,” Elizabeth echoed quietly, “and I found that she is boundless. It is us humans who think we can trap her in names. But there are ways, hidden passages from one name to another, piecing her back together. I don’t know them - that is, I don’t know all of them. But I know one who does. A... friend of mine, a cartographer by trade.”

Henry’s round face became, if possible, more eager. “Unca Jack!”

“Aye,” Mr. Gibbs interjected proudly. “If there’s one manjack what can find a heading, Jack is the man.” 

“The difficulty, of course, lies in finding Jack.” Elizabeth smiled, disclosing the source of Henry’s dimples. “But I sail prepared. Mr. Cotton!”

Mr. Cotton stepped forward. He reminded Susan of Professor Kirk, sans the bushy hair, if the Professor had entertained a blue parrot on his shoulder. He had the same cottony beard, the same kindness in his eyes. 

“I have a message for Captain Barbossa,” Elizabeth informed him. “Pray convey his king’s compliments, and ask him for Captain Sparrow’s current bearings.” She glanced over at Mr. Gibbs. “Where one is, the other’s not far behind. Which is why I’ve commandeered a man from either ship to serve on mine. Keep your enemy brethren closer, all that.”

Susan was still trying to parse the message. “You’re a… king?”

“Aye,” said Elizabeth casually, “though you might say I’m half retired. As long as Henry is a child, I promised myself that I’d sail short of the open sea and keep to the isles. We’re landlubbers, mostly, but the sea fever never quite left me, and I’ll be danged if I spend the dog days in a dress. Now, Mr. Cotton. Do you need me to repeat?”

Mr. Cotton shook his head. But it was the parrot that opened its beak and croaked “Jack Sparrow! Jack Sparrow! Need of Jack Sparrow!” and flew away.

Of course, the parrot was a Talking Bird in essence. Perhaps there _was_ a continuity between seas, and worlds, then, just as Aslan had implied when He had last taken leave of Susan. The shadow of death, already shrunk with every hour spent under this radiant sun, dwindled further. Susan turned to Elizabeth, the wind fanning her hair out until it brushed the blond mist of Elizabeth’s, and asked, “This… Barbossa. Do you trust his word?”

“If I didn’t, I’d be a spinster still,” said Elizabeth, and left Susan even more puzzled than she’d been when first hauled onto the deck.

* * *

The wind must have favoured them, for the parrot was back the next day at noon, landing on the deck and squawking “Rum tale! Rum tale!”.

Susan’s heart sank a little in disappointment. But Mr. Cotton only shook his head before he went to fetch his bird a tot. Its beak oiled, the bird opened it again, this time to pronounce “Pirate’s Lair!” and keel over in a dead sleep.

This was it, then - the oracle. It did not bode well to Susan. 

“Ah,” said Elizabeth meanwhile, pensive. “Yes, it figures. He’s probably run out of powder.”

“Or a ship,” said Mr. Gibbs.

“Or a… slap,” one of the crew hands muttered. There were titters.

“What are your orders, Cap’n Swann?” came next, with Elizabeth answering “Pirate’s Lair, clearly. We’re not even that far. If we keep to our present course of knots, we ought to reach it by midnight. Mr. Gibbs, if you’ll do the honours?”

“Aye, aye,” a rejuvenated Gibbs beamed. “Lads! Hoist the colours!”

 _I should have known_ , thought Susan. Seven years ago, her American year, Lucy’s long letter on how Caspian had revived his piratic legacy (though honorably). Susan, on the brink of her _That’s nice, dear_ phase, had skimmed the letter en route to an Embassy tea party. But some of it had stuck through the afternoon, like a shimmer of salt and turquoise spread over the strictly cropped lawns. Holding a china cup, giggling at some diplomat’s silver-haired wit, she had thought of Caspian roaming the waves, and felt - envy? Anger? For Aslan had opened a way back onto the South for the Telmarines; had allowed Caspian his sabbatical year of merging with the strength and beauty of the open sea. Whereas she and Peter were confined to cramming and teadrinking respectively. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair _at all._

“...better stay aboard, hidden. Not that there should be any great risk - not when the Code says you’re under my protection. But there’s so much chapter and verse to the Code, these days… you can never tell who's read what, or what they’ve made of the reading. Not with pirates.”

Proud nodding from the men.

“Absolutely not,” said Susan, still heated from her mental tussle with Aslan. “You may be royalty, Elizabeth, but so am I. I don’t like to fight - I don’t care if this makes me a wench, I don’t like the _mess_ of it, but I’m certainly not going to hide in a dark place” (likely to double as a smelly place) “while you go on a quest for me. Find me a good strong bow, and see if I can hold my own.”

The nodding stopped. The men traded somewhat baffled gazes.

“I’d rather keep my bow and stern, if it’s all the same to Your Majesty,” said Elizabeth. “But do come. It’s bound to be a short trip, anyway - I know where Jack’s land legs tend to land him up.”

* * *

Pirate’s Lair was both dark and smelly. And noisy. _Very_ noisy. The tiny island, as Elizabeth had explained on their way, was some sort of floating bazaar for pirates to stock up on cutlasses and powder (and parakeets), lie low after one bicker too many with their cap’n, or catch up with sea mates. The Royal Navy knew better than to investigate. Susan ploughed her way in between a brawl and a song, following Elizabeth into The Bachelor’s Delight - the dubious local named after William Dampier’s ship.

The quest ended right there, right then, because the man Jack was propping the wall up, where it was not lined with fairly antique weapons. He was nursing a bottle of rum, and he looked the very antipode of Susan’s idea of a pirate. Looked, if anything, as she herself might if she ever grew a mustache and goatee and bathed her eyes in kohl.

“Darlin’!” he told Elizabeth with a swashing flourish of hand. “Look at you, as fresh as a pickle-free cucumber. And this would be…?”

“The reason we’re here. I need your compass, Jack - Susan here needs it. She wishes to join her family, all of whom are dead, only not quite.”

“Again with the macabre ladies,” said Jack sombrely. “Merci you, but merci no. I’m good.”

“And how is the Pearl?” Elizabeth riposted. Met with a kohl-heavy glare, she sighed. “So what was it this time - Aeolus’ bag of winds? Anansi’s basket? St. Elmo's fire?”

Which was her mistake - not in riling Jack, who merely shrugged, but in speaking up pat when there was a lull in the atmospheric riot. The audience appeal veered sharply from the two ruffians holding each other at gunpoint to their little corner. “St. Elmo's fire?” one patron called out. “Two years of me loot I sank in that scheme, and look what it got me - naught!”

“Quiet!” called Elizabeth, standing up and tall - too late. The theme had caught on.

“Called it the Elmo Fire Company, he did!” another roared. “Buy yerself a portable flame, said he, and then went and burnt his ship down!”

“A doleful end,” Jack Sparrow murmured, “but not a shipwreck, to lend the debate a semantically correct note, and I saved the prow and wheel. Just here to recoup my losses.” He hiccupped.

But the rumour had spread - like fire, indeed - and the riotocracy was turning on them like one man. In a flash of knowing, Susan saw what would ensue: carnage or flight, either resulting in no compass and no charts, and no chance ever to find her folks again. She wheeled to her right, one long braid smacking Jack's head smartly, and shouted “Enough!”.

Nobody heard her. Next to her, Elizabeth had come to grips with Jack’s number one creditor, both at literal daggers. Susan fought to raise her voice above the din. “That’s quite enough!”

When it was drowned again, she wheeled to her left and inspected the wall. The inn owner, a self-respecting pirate, kept all his antique weapons stocked, locked and barrelled, perhaps trusting in their rusty condition to do no harm. Susan grabbed the most familiar. It had been out of use for a near-century, once the Age of Enlightenment and Gunpowder had rolled in, but it was still an impressive piece - with three arrows still locked in its multiple-bow frame. Susan lodged the stock under her arm, pinched the string (oh, the familiarity!) with her other hand, drawing it back tightly, and launched her first bolt. With a somewhat rusty whistle, it went exactly where she willed it - right past the ear of Creditor Two and into one of the low wooden beams.

The riotocracy froze at once. 

“I have a crossbow,” Susan said, chin up, “and I shall use it again.” She turned to target a new bolt at Elizabeth’s duellist. Elizabeth’s gaze met hers above her dagger - king to queen, Eve’s daughters both. This, Susan thought. This was _she_ , not one whit of denial left. She sent an arrow of love to her siblings, one that lit a path from the smoky den to Peter’s fortitude, Lucy’s courage, Ed’s cleverness, all of them her legacy. “Now let us pass.”

And they did, while Jack reeled between them, waving his hands in blurred goodbyes to the crowd, Elizabeth a steady rear guard. They made it to the bay and the small rowboat, unscathed, before Susan dropped the crossbow to the ground and collapsed into giggles and Elizabeth’s arms.

“We did it! Oh god, tell me he still has the compass and charts!”

“Aye,” said Jack. “At your service. Quite a match you’ve found here, Elizabeth - a lady of as persuasive a persuasion as you are.”

“Less matter and more chart, you.”

“In the morning. I can’t navigate on a drunk stomach and a tipsy head, you know that. And it’s pitch dark, there be the rub. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet, sweet ladies” - and, having somehow reeled himself on board of the Swan, Jack was quickly engulfed in the men’s hearty welcome.

Elizabeth winked over to Susan.

“He keeps the charts - till the morrow. But, guess what? We keep the bottle.”

* * *

Having checked on Henry, fast asleep in his nursery hammock, they drew the porthole open.

The warm breeze soon filled Elizabeth’s cabin. It cupped Susan’s cheek as she raised her glass in the moonglow, staring at the rum. The rum glowed, too. Goldbrown with an undercurrent of red, just as Bacchus’s wine, its otherworldly cousin, had let colors run into one another. She had been wary of Bacchus and his madcap girls, then; now she put the glass to her lips and felt as if the last piece of Narnian Susan had been found, hovering on the rim.

“To gentlewomen,” said Elisabeth, raising her glass.

And there it was.

Susan found and held the goldbrown gaze. “To the fierce girls,” she said.

The rum did not swirl her head as expected, but it woke every fibre in her; burst into warm sweetness in her throat and made her want for more. She dipped her finger in it to coat her lips, then, laughing, the dip of her throat; looked over at Elizabeth, and thought of that sweetwater, that had to taste like firewater now. 

“But you’re married,” she said aloud, a reminder for herself.

Elizabeth slipped an arm round her neck, letting their faces lean into each other.

“I am,” she said. “But ours is no common marriage. He is bonded to the Sea, and so am I, in my own way, and the Sea, the Sea is a woman, Susan, not gentle, Susan, but generous. And so is he, my Will. I cannot be with him for many years; and I swore, after we were wedded, that I would not be sheath or hearth to any other man.”

“But women…”

“Aye,” said Elisabeth, a husky parting of lips. “The consolation that comes of women, the salt of them. Give it and take it, he said. I would not have you forsake pleasure for my sake, not I. And so I have.”

“Oh,” said Susan, matching vowel to vowel. 

Their lips touched, and the tip of their tongues. The ship leant a bit sideways, inclining them towards the bunk, and the breeze teased at the fabric over their breasts. They had barely touched the rum, but the touching went a long way after that. It was gentle and then not; but only in the fierceness that counts, that rips the numbness away to pump more life into our hearts. It drove Susan’s lips to where Elizabeth’s secret hair grew, blond in the moonlight, and it let her taste the saltwater that could only be reached by a special kiss, before Elizabeth refreshed it with her mouth. They held each other and were ebb and flow to each other’s fingers, and filled the cabin with wet little sounds that never woke Henry, even when they surged into a cry and a fall, down, down solace, down neverending solace.

They slept all through Elizabeth’s watch, but no one, not even Pirate Lord Jack Sparrow, dared to stir the ladies.

* * *

There was fresh linen, there was a (hasty) morning wash and a (less hasty) morning kiss. 

And there was a compass.

“Just think of what you want,” said Elizabeth. They were standing on the deck, the men swept in a reverent half-circle around them. “What you want most.”

The slight shadows under her eyes, that owed nothing to kohl, made her even more desirable by day, and Susan paused. But the surge under the hull was a reminder. She would never forget Elizabeth, but she and Elizabeth each had their quest, even if their journeys had pulled close for a while. She closed her eyes and touched the green ring on her finger; she thought of her brothers and Lucy as she had last seen them, tightening the belts on their overcoats; of Father and Mother who had loved her too; and let herself be submerged by the thought, pitting the sum of her against their absence. 

When she looked again, the compass needle was in a fever. 

“East,” said Jack at last, and began to turn the concentric circles on his map this way and that, his fingers gliding over the mystic keys. It was as if the maps bloomed into worlds, Susan felt, more and more of them coming up, striking an infinite perspective while they still fitted into one vast orb. An odd sense came over her, like somebody else’s deja vu.

Then Jack’s hands stilled on the charts.

“The Sea of… Lilies?! Ah. Hmmm. Sounds a little, savvy, _French_ territory, but the enemy of my enemy etcetera. Elizabeth, dear. Orders?”

“Susan?” And Elizabeth’s smooth tanned face was turned to her.

Susan felt past words - only suffused with the joy of hope, the pure strong longing that no longer fed on loss, but strained towards reunion. She nodded.

“Mr. Gibbs, an easterly course, if you please,” said Elizabeth, and turned Susan’s shoulders gently so she could watch the rising sun.

* * *

They reached the Sea of Lilies after a week and a day's sailing. Unless it was a day and an hour - Susan could never quite say afterwards. Part of her felt that it had taken forever, while the thrill in her, never abated, made it the blink of an eye.

Elizabeth insisted that she take the rowboat. Once Susan was seated in it (they had said their goodbyes at dawn in the cabin’s privacy), she looked all the way up and saw her trying to smile gamely, holding Henry close to her.

(“A word,” Jack had said in lieu of farewell. “If, in your twists and turns hereafter, you happen to cross oars with a gentleman - a big wig, really, big enough to make a lady a muff…”

“I’ll give him his daughter’s love,” Susan promised, earning herself a humid gaze.)

“To gentlewomen,” she told Elizabeth now.

“To gentlewomen,” Elizabeth cried, her call taken up and echoed by the crew, and the breeze, as the lilies parted gently in front of Susan.

The breeze pushed the boat forward, the oars a redundancy, and Susan let it carry her further up and further in, her face set to the sun.


End file.
